Deadline Management in Intelligent Agents

Abstract: This paper describes an approach to reasoning about goals with deadlines
in an intelligent agent. The presented approach builds on the model of dynamic control
where control plans describing the desirable behavior of an agent are dynamically
constructed and used by meta-control decisions to choose the best behavior of the agent
at each point in time. We extend this model by introducing scheduling behaviors that
construct a control schedule of tasks required for time constrained goals, and by
changing the meta-control decision criterion to consider both the current control
plan and the current control schedule when deciding which behaviors to execute.
We also present in this paper demonstrations and experimental results in the domain
of office robots showing that our approach keeps the control cost low, and brings
more run-time flexibility than current approaches.